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September 14, 2009
Basket Case
Bruce Ratner SHoPs for respectability.
NY Magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson understands why SHoP took the call from Bruce Ratner to step in and dress up the arena at Atlantic Yards, but sees the latest developments as "pointless" and allows no excuses for the firm allowing itself "to be used to gussy up a degraded project with architectural flimflam."
The latest design, by the joined forces of SHoP Architects and Ellerbe Becket, is much handsomer than the quickie renderings Ratner floated in June after dumping Frank Gehry for being too expensive. But comparing fictional arenas is beside the point by now. Atlantic Yards is too far gone to be rescued by a nice façade.
When Ratner first unveiled the Atlantic Yards project in 2003, it was to be a complex on a virtually Vatican scale, with office towers, apartment buildings, and public spaces springing from an arena—all of it designed by Gehry. Six years later, we’re left with a possible basketball court in a prairie of blight. Profound urbanistic issues—how a diffuse borough as populous as Houston would reshape itself around a new high-rise mini-metropolis, created by fiat and designed by a single architect—have given way to bickering over how to decorate a shed. SHoP’s answer to this pointless question is a clever one: Wrap it in steel basketry, evoking the photogenic “bird’s nest” stadium that Herzog & de Meuron bestowed on Beijing. It worked for China, but in Brooklyn, the bird’s nest is just another way to dress up a turkey.
Davidson incisively sums up the nearly six-year history of Atlantic Yards:
So far, though, the successive proposals have followed a very ordinary New York arc, from exhilarating master plan to plodding, piddling half-measures. Instead of the epicenter of urban transformation, Atlantic Yards has turned into a ghostly landscape without a present, only a history and a costly dream. Ratner has demolished old buildings and emptied homes, committing himself along the way to putting up affordable housing he can’t afford, luxury apartments he can’t fill, and offices he may never rent.
Atlantic Yards Report, New York Magazine critic calls AY "a degraded project with architectural flimflam"
DDDB.net, New York Mag: With Barclays Arena Design SHoP Dresses Up a Turkey
Posted by lumi at September 14, 2009 5:33 AM